Saga - OT Archaeologist in a Clandestine Installation (Oneshot for Angsty Settings Roulette Challenge)

Title: Archaeologist in a Clandestine Installation

Author: devilinthedetails

Genre: Angst; General; Character Study.

Timeline: Saga-OT. Around the time of ANH.

Characters: Rebel OC's.

Summary: The bleak and cynical reflections of an archaeologist turned Rebel stationed on Yavin IV.

Author's Note: Written for the Angsty Settings Roulette Challenge hosted by the wonderful @ViariSkywalker. My assigned setting was a secret military installation, and I also included the bonus challenge of using the words malleable, malevolent, and mesmerize into my story.

Archaeologist in a Clandestine Installation

A shrill alarm pierced the air beside the slumbering Kanchana Lalita. Grumbling incoherently to herself, Kanchana stretched out a pink arm to silence the alarm chrono on her flimsy wood nightstand before it could awaken her roommate Pranee Lawan, whom she had heard through a haze of sleep climbing the rungs to the bunk above her only a few minutes ago.

Pranee’s shift of duty was scheduled to end shortly before Kanchana’s commenced, so their schedules and sleep cycles rarely aligned (which might have been a blessing from the Force given the percussive snores that often radiated from Pranee’s bunk). They were little more than ships passing at the misty hours of dusk or dawn to each other.

There was scant space in the room for any furniture apart from their bunks, a shared wardrobe barely big enough to fit their uniforms and other essential equipment, and the nightstand into which they crammed a majority of the personal effects they hadn’t been able to leave behind when they joined the Rebellion.

It reminded her of an even bleaker and more utilitarian version of the shoebox-sized dormitories she had been crammed into as first an undergraduate and then a graduate student studying archaeology at the University of Coruscant. Except on Coruscant her permaglass windows had gazed out upon a bright, bustling campus in the beating heart of one of Coruscant’s most vibrant and populous districts. Near the Senate and the galaxy’s center of power. It had been so easy once to let those neon holosigns advertising luxurious new products and exciting experiences at the Republic’s most exclusive entertainment venues mesmerize her. Fill her dreams day and night.

Now she was far away from that bright hub of power. Hidden in the Outer Rim with a rotating cast of a thousand of her fellow Rebels. Her window staring out at klick upon klick of humid jungle.

She had hoped once she had earned coveted position as tenured professor and then chair of the esteemed archaeology department at the University of Coruscant that her days of contorting herself into such cramped living quarters were behind her except when she slept in tents at the sites of various excavations and digs funded for by the many grants for which she and her graduate student assistants tirelessly applied.

All that had changed overnight when the Republic had fallen. When the Empire replaced it. When the grant money for researching the ancient non-human civilizations that had been Kanchana’s passion and speciality had evaporated. When the climate at the University of Coruscant had changed from open inquiry and critical thinking to unquestioning dogma and naked propaganda.

The only grants the Empire had been interested in funding were for projects meant to reinforce their own propaganda. To emphasize the superiority of ancient human civilizations and to dismiss the achievements of non-human civilizations to portray non-humans as primitives and savages who ought to be grateful for the enlightenment and order the human-led Empire brought to their worlds and cultures.

Archaeology had been something malleable in the Empire’s perspective. Something they could twist and distort to affirm their imperial will.

Kanchana had been too proud of her research to allow it to become mere clay for the Empire to shape to suit its dictatorial purposes. So she had resigned her post decades before her pension–adjusted in proportion to her longer Mirialan life expectancy–kicked in. Had made covert inquiries that could have gotten her shot in some black Coruscanti alley. Had joined the Rebellion.

Become an expert in logistics and requisitions. Skilled at creating spreadsheets and lists to track supplies as she had once been meticulous at documenting the observations and discoveries of her field research. Her purple eyes now reading requisition reports on her datapad until they began to blur together at the end of her twelve hour shifts instead of peer-reviewed articles in academic journals.

Not surrendering to nostalgia for life as it had been before the rise of the Empire, Kanchana grabbed her towel and toiletry bag from the tiny shelf built into the wardrobe. Took the single step that separated the wardrobe from the door. Walked into the hallway with its walls carefully engineered to narrow slightly as they rose to give any who entered it the subtly unnerving sensation of being trapped. An enduring reminder that Sith had been architects of this Yavin IV temple the Rebels had converted into their clandestine military installation.

The hallway was lined with sleeping quarters for a hundred of her fellow Rebels. She knew from her study as an archaeologist that this Sith temple had been built by the conscripted labor of the brainwashed masses of Massassi slaves. A race lost to history and time.

A malevolent air lingered in the hallway–in the entire Rebel base–despite the millennia in which the Sith Temple had been vacant. Abandoned.

This hallway had once housed the stark dormitories of the Massassi slaves. Now it sheltered Rebel soldiers and officers from the clenching fist of the Empire and the fierce thunderstorms that could tear through the jungle with little warning as its weather systems shifted.

She reached the communal refresher at the midpoint of the hallway. Stepped into an unoccupied shower unit. Turned the water on cold. To further wake her with a sharp shock like her chrono’s alarm so that her brain would be clear from all fog of sleep when she started her shift. Also because the water in the showers was never anything more than what could optimistically be termed lukewarm, and she preferred not to begin her morning with dashed hopes of hot water that would never come shooting out of the faucet.

After her brief, cold shower, she wrapped herself in her towel and padded down to the tiny collective kitchenette at the end of the hallway. Anyone stationed at the base was welcome to eat in the mess, but trudging down to the mess often demanded more energy than Kanchana was prepared to exert in the morning. She preferred to take what small and dull rations passed as her breakfast at the kitchenette.

At the kitchenette, there was a tetrawave, a chilling unit usually packed with an assortment of uninspired frozen meals, a basket of crumbly protein bars made from dried fruits and nuts foraged from the nearby jungle, a caf maker, and tiny cups that could be inserted into the caf maker to produce wonderful, steaming mugs of the fragrant, brown drink that probably fueled their Rebellion even more than hope no matter what Mon Mothma asserted in her starry-eyed speeches.

Kanchana took down her mug from the rack hanging above the caf maker. It had been given to her many years ago by a favorite graduate student she had guided through a thorny thesis process. The mug proclaimed her in rather grandiose terms as the number one archaeology professor in the universe.

She wondered if she held onto it out of some defiant pride or determination to preserve her past identity. So that perhaps some cracked fragments of the mug might survive if this temple was destroyed as the Rebel base it was by the Empire. So that future archaeologists–if archaeology still existed as a field–might dig it up. Piece it together. Realize that she–or at least people like her–had been here. Had fought for freedom against impossible odds here. She wanted some shattered memory of herself to survive to be discovered. She did not want all remnants of herself to be lost to time and tyranny.

She put her favorite variety of caf cup—one that had a sweet, nutty flavor to it–in the caf maker. Switched on the caf maker and then disappeared back to her room to change.

She would be dressed in her uniform, her green hair pulled into a tight, no-nonsense bun, by the time her caf was ready. Then, armed with her trusty mug of caf, she would begin another long day of fighting the Empire with logistics and requisitions.

Reminding herself that a Rebel army lived and died by its stomach. By its supply lines.

That it was her job to fill that stomach. To be that supply line.

No matter how hard the Empire tried to starve that stomach. To snip off that supply line.

She could never let exhaustion and despair overcome her. No matter how much the monotony of her life in logistics and requisitions, spreadsheets and lists, took a toll on her at this clandestine Rebel base in the humid jungle of Yavin IV.

 

Wonderfully poignant; and of course good old Massassi Base is the perfect example of a "secret military installation," though because it's such a central location in the Saga it can sometimes be easy to forget that. And this is a completely believable and very telling look into the life of the Rebels who live and work there. The conditions are cramped, the creature comforts are few, the days are arduous and tiring, and honestly, most people there probably do feel less like starry-eyed freedom fighters at this point than like semi-mindless drudges most days.

And then, as an archaeologist, Kanchana has additional perspective on the location of the base: she, better than most, knows what it once was and the history behind it. The Massassi who built it certainly knew what arduous drudge work was like. Kanchana's position as archaeologist gives her a perspective on a possible future too: Maybe someday, if the Empire finds it and destroys it, Massassi Base will also be a ruin and an excavation site, at which someone finds the shards of her "#1 Archaeology Professor" mug—and draws what conclusions from it? At least it would be some small part of her that would survive.

But even with her thoughts on the past and the future, Kanchana is eminently practical and doesn't forget about the here and now and about her job in requisitions—and its importance to the cause. Definitely not the most glamorous job, and not the kind that would get featured much in one's average grandiose cinematic space opera—but oh so essential for any kind of military endeavor, especially one on this scale. And important for her personally, too, as it's what keeps her going from day to day under near-impossible circumstances.

Great job with this prompt; thank you for sharing this insightful and keenly felt character portrait with us!